Utilities targeting community choice energy programs

From the sunny shores of San Diego to the foggy dunes of Humboldt, dozens of communities across California are clamoring for a choice in electricity providers and cleaner power sources. One bill, AB 2145, threatens to stand in the way. Assemblyman Steve Bradford, D-Gardena, a former utility industry executive flush with utility industry campaign contributions, has introduced a bill that would erase 12 years of efforts to establish nonprofit, publicly accountable local community choice energy programs that provide customers with an alternative to the monopoly utilities.

Community choice energy programs work like this: They bundle the buying power of local residents and businesses and use it to buy electricity and to provide customers with energy efficiency products and services that help tame their electricity bills. These programs can purchase cleaner energy or develop new local resources. Hence, communities with community choice programs enjoy cleaner air, infusions of dollars and green jobs into their local economies and local, democratic control of their electricity.

Sounds good, right? But not everyone welcomes the advent of community choice. Monopoly utilities have fought against the concept every step of the way. Four years ago, they spent $46 million on Proposition 16, which would have entrenched their monopolies in the California Constitution by requiring a two-thirds majority of voters to establish any competing community choice program.

The utility monopolies lost on Prop 16, but now they’re back with their latest attempt at undermining energy choice and competition, AB 2145. SDG&E wrote a misleading and self-serving letter of support of AB 2145. The bill would eliminate a crucial provision of existing law that allows customers to group together at the outset of their community choice program, so that they have the group buying power needed to establish clean energy competition against the massive market leverage of those corporate utility monopolies. AB 2145 would block them from doing so.

Without a critical mass of customers, a community choice program cannot carry out its mission of bringing affordable clean power to the people. If enacted, AB 2145 would replace community choice with zero choice.

Community choice is a nonpartisan, common-sense solution embraced by conservative and liberal communities alike. Lancaster is the latest California city to take steps toward forming a community choice program. Lancaster’s Republican Mayor Rex Parris said, “The entire focus of the [program] is on increasing consumer choice, thereby increasing competition in the marketplace and providing better service to the residents of Lancaster.”

San Diego is poised to follow in the footsteps of Marin, Sonoma and Lancaster. Indian reservations, commercial parking lots, and airport hangars will one day produce long-term income for their owners because the district will become an energy buyer for its customers, you the people. The district will offer clean energy sellers a procurement contract known as the Feed-In-Tariff. Construction companies, commercial lenders and property owners that plan now will be at the head of the line with shovel-ready projects.

For the vast majority of Californians fed up with soaring electricity rates and last century’s fossil fuel-intensive energy technologies, community choice is a breath of fresh air. Many cities and counties, including San Diego, are forming community choice programs, but Bradford’s bill would stop them cold. This is why the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties oppose AB 2145. California communities have many and varied reasons to adopt community choice, from greenhouse gas reductions to clean air to local job creation.

Let’s not let AB 2145, aka the Utility Power Grab of 2014, kill our best shot at bringing affordable, clean power to the people.

Sharman is co-founder and chair of the San Diego Energy District Foundation and a member of Californians for Energy Choice.